Word: religion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...France. Thus it is not surprising that her natural subject is the varieties of spiritual exile. Expatriates, orphans, refugees and misfits make up the cast in her two novels and scores of stories. Home Truths, her sixth collection of short fiction, catches her characters in full flight from family, religion and country. All are bearers of a metaphorical "true passport" that transcends nationality and signifies internal freedom. For some this serves as a safe-conduct to independence. For others it is a guarantee of loneliness and despair...
...response, many of Wyndal's whites lose themselves in fantasies of an apocalyptic day of reckoning. One of Waiting's most unsettling achievements is its revelation of how distorted forms of religion become essential to a community that takes itself to be God's elect. In the book's most chilling scene, 40 middle-class citizens quietly file into a gaslit packing shed to hear a tirade against the agents of the Antichrist. First they hear a harangue, then on cassette the voice of an American who claims to have defected from the forces of darkness. The agents of Satan...
...shoving between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And Ziegler argues convincingly that Mountbatten's handling of the transfer of power in India in 1947 was a success, considering political realities there. He opposed the splitting off of Muslim Pakistan from India and tried to prevent it. But religion had its customary disastrous effect on politics. Hindus and Muslims despised each other; partition and the bloodshed that followed, says Ziegler, were inevitable...
...Communist Party functionary in Dnepropetrovsk before Andropov made him a KGB deputy chairman in 1968. Chebrikov is well chosen as a guardian of Communist conformity: in 1981 he railed against the "contamination of Soviet youth by Western ideas" and has since waged campaigns against "reactionary theological concepts," meaning religion, and against "Zionism." He was elevated to lead the KGB in December 1982, and became a Politburo candidate member...
Coming from the man who, in Love Story, captured the Harvard of the early '60s right down to 'Cliffie bitchiness and the secular religion that is Crimson hockey, it's no surprise that the college portions of the novel ring true. The one problem here is that the period 1954-58 was not, to put it mildly, a time of campus unrest or even great social shakeups. Segal makes up for this with painstaking accounts of such bygone rigors as the Step Test and the Swim Test, while ignoring real campus news like the hockey heyday of Bob (really...